Exiles in the Garden (17 page)

Lucia said, Do you know the work of Walter Benjamin?

Nikolas said, Of course.

They talked about Benjamin all the time, his monomania, his paranoia, his obsession with commerce, his difficult sentences, more difficult even in German than in English translation. Walter Benjamin was a displaced person of the most radical sort, in Lucia's mother's opinion, and Nikolas readily agreed. Lucia was about to say that her husband had never read Walter Benjamin. Had no idea who he was. But in the end she said nothing. She never brought Alec into their conversations.

Nikolas was eager to speak of his family, his mother an illustrator, his father an artisan in the building trades. Nikolas had an older brother but the brother had disappeared, walked out the door one day and never returned; they had no idea where he was, but he had always been a wild lad. Wasn't it strange the way people could disappear, here today and gone tomorrow, without explanation? Yes it was, Lucia said; one more thing that bound her and Nikolas together. Very soon the afternoon movies led to afternoons at Nikolas's studio apartment in Arlington, Mrs. Bazaroff engaged two or three times a week now to look after Mathilde when she returned from school. Relations between Mrs. Bazaroff and Lucia grew chilly and Lucia knew that her trusted neighbor would soon leave them, much as she loved their little girl. But that was a bridge that could be crossed only when arrived at. Even so, Lucia was put off by the older woman's not so subtle expressions of disapproval. She no longer inquired into Lucia's whereabouts nor when she intended to return home, as if neither answer would be the truth. Mrs. Bazaroff was almost a member of the family, having looked after Mathilde since she was an infant. But she had always been partial to Alec.

Lucia was in a vortex she could not control. Not that control was uppermost in her mind; Nikolas was uppermost in her mind. She both did and didn't want to control the vortex. Desire and conscience were at war within her, though war was surely the wrong word because the struggle was undisclosed and unacknowledged, a behind-the-scenes business. As for the covert nature of her affair—what else was she to do? She was a married woman. She had a young daughter. She had to take precautions.

They came in very high, the aircraft throttled back. The Bernese and the Glarus Alps were visible to the south, their summits glittering in the dawn. Lucia thought she had never seen a sight so beautiful. The Zurichsee was below her, blue as a robin's egg. The aircraft made a wide turn, shuddering, and settled at last into its glide path. The city looked no different to her. She identified the Rudolf Brun Bridge and the Landesmuseum. Everything was as she had left it. She turned from the window and silently prayed that Providence would be kind; things would work out.

Lucia and Nikolas were trying to arrange a weekend rendezvous when Alec proposed she make the visit to Zurich. Nikolas quickly secured an invitation to lecture at the university, and he and Lucia met there, at a café they both knew well, on the first of October 1970. They spent two hours in the café, drinking coffee, drawing things out, then walked to the pension where Nikolas had booked a room. He asked her right away if there had been any trouble about Mathilde. No, Lucia said, no trouble. And you? Nikolas asked. I am where I want to be, Lucia replied. In Zurich with you. No place else? he asked, teasing her. He had found she teased easily, a temperament thing with the Swiss. But she only laughed and pulled down the sheets of the bed, where they spent the remainder of the morning and most of the afternoon.

Alec was glad his wife was taking a holiday. She had seemed so down in the dumps, snappish with Mathilde, distant with him. She appeared to have cut off all contact with her émigré friends. The truth was, Lucia was tired and needed a break. Mrs. Bazaroff, with feelings of high foreboding, agreed to stay in the house while Lucia was in Switzerland and Alec on the road with the campaign. She knew what Lucia was up to—Mrs. Bazaroff was not Russian for nothing—and had known for months but had kept her mouth shut. She had never approved of Lucia's friendships with the émigrés, some of whom she knew from her church and the musical evenings she attended. They were a conspiratorial lot, brooding and sly, volatile, great talkers, bone idle. They always knew what was good for you, boulevardier commissars. They also knew, or suspected, that Lucia was involved with Nikolas Janos and so there was talk; rumor piled upon conjecture, the bread and wine of expatriate life. Mrs. Bazaroff grieved for little Mathilde but did not consider it her place to intervene. Mr. Alec would not have believed her anyhow, being fully as credulous as most men. God, what dolts they were, unable to see what was in front of their own eyes. In fact the closer it was, the blinder they were. Mrs. Bazaroff knew things would end badly. How else could they end? Lucia and her layabout paramour were living inside a novel by the hysteric Dostoyevsky where the ending was always predictable. In any case, Alec was destined to be the last to know.

Lucia emptied her bank account—she had been careful over the years and had amassed a sizable nest egg—prudently leaving behind a thousand dollars to keep the account active in the event things didn't work out. She had been taught to leave a little something in reserve for emergencies. But as it happened, things worked out better than she could have imagined. Nikolas was loving and enthusiastic, full of plans, eager to explore Lucia's bohemian Zurich of memory—though he did joke with her that bohemia was difficult to imagine in a city whose devotion to the secret accumulation of great wealth was spiritual in its intensity.

They took a trip to the Engadine and hiked for a week, putting up at modest rest houses en route. It was at one of the rest houses that Lucia discovered Nikolas's work routine. She was awakened at five
A.M.
by a murmur, Nikolas talking to himself. She saw him hunched over the small table near the window writing furiously and knew soon enough that the murmur was not speech but the sound of Nikolas's pen racing across the pages, one page after another, and when he finished one he dropped it on the floor. The writer's heavy shoulders strained with the effort, his head bent like a bull preparing its charge. She imagined steam coming from his ears as if his brain was a mighty turbine. Fascinated, she watched him for a quarter-hour. Watched the pages accumulate at his feet. Watched the rhythmic motion of his head. Only once did he pause, his pen raised one foot above the page, and in an instant he was writing again. She closed her eyes, listening to the sound of his pen, the sheet dropping to the floor, a hiss as he drew a fresh sheet from the ream placed to his right at the edge of the table.

At breakfast the next morning Lucia told him what she had seen.

I disturbed your sleep! he said.

I didn't mind, she said. I was fascinated.

It's the way I go about things, he said.

I've never seen anything like it, she said. The concentration.

It's the way Balzac worked, he said. How else do you write eighty novels in thirty years? Plus journalism, sketches, short stories, reviews, personal letters. He was a titan! Nikolas said, loud enough that the people at the next table looked up in alarm. He wrote at night, slept during the day. Wasted eternities in fashionable salons. But even so, the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century. He never wrote a bad book.

And his love life? Lucia asked.

He loved women and women loved him.

He had many women, then.

Many, many women. There was something preposterous about Balzac, his taste for highborn women, his absurd get-rich-quick schemes. He wanted to import Russian oak for the making of French railway carriages, projects of that kind. None of them panned out, not one. He wanted so to be rich, surrounded by liveried servants and valuable paintings and costly garments and countesses. But at the end he had but one woman, Madame de Hanska, to whom he was completely faithful. She was filthy rich and not good to Balzac. She mocked him. She allowed him to die unattended.

This is not encouraging, Lucia said.

Read Zweig's biography, Nikolas said. It's all there.

Stefan Zweig figured in my mother's salon, Lucia said. Not personally. But they were always talking about him.

And well they might. Another titan. Nikolas signaled for another plate of eggs and a biscuit with jam. More coffee.

Balzac drank an ocean of coffee each day, Nikolas said. His doctors believed that was one reason he died so young, age fifty-one. Coffee ruined his stomach, and his work habits ruined his heart and mind. Eighty books in just over thirty years. Victor Hugo gave the eulogy.

I have to tell you, Nikolas went on, that Madame de Hanska was lovely whereas Balzac looked like me. Ate like me, too. Nikolas accepted his second helping of eggs with the biscuit on the side. Breakfast concluded, they took a long walk in the mountains. Nikolas was agile for a man of his size. After an hour, Lucia took the lead. They walked along paths and through meadows. As they climbed the air grew chillier. They were often in shade, looking down the valley with its chalets spread out before them. They did not talk much, content with the view and the exertion of the climb. Lucia's leg bothered her, unaccustomed as she was to mountain walking. She realized suddenly that Mathilde had never seen a mountain. She was growing up a flatlander and that was impermissible. A child should know snow-covered summits, the world beyond the tree line. Lucia paused, waiting for Nikolas to catch up. When at last she decreed that they head back to the rest house, he agreed readily. They took the road back down walking arm in arm. Lucia had never been happier. She chose not to wonder where all this was leading. She didn't care where it was leading. It seemed to her that she was at the threshold of the European life she had always desired.

That night at dinner they celebrated with a bottle of sekt, and when they returned to Zurich Lucia began a long letter to Alec explaining the facts of the matter, believing he would understand and wish her well once she told him what was in her heart. If he refused to understand—well, that would be shortsighted of him. People had to accept what they were given.

T
HEIR PENSION
was situated on a quiet square bordered by shade trees. There were tables and chairs under the trees and a dour concessionaire who sold coffee and croissants from a cart. Traffic was light. Lucia bought stationery at the shop on the corner and settled herself at one of the tables with her coffee and croissant, a sheet of blank white paper before her. She wrote nothing for the longest time, watching pedestrians in the square while she organized her thoughts. The day was overcast but warm for October. Lucia was lulled by the quiet and the orderliness of the square. She smiled as an elderly couple passed in front of her, the man thickset from what appeared to be a lifetime of good living, the woman slender with an athletic spring to her step. Lucia tried to think of herself and Nikolas in forty years, living comfortably in Zurich or some other European city, still companionable, still in love. She found herself unable to peer far into the future. She could not imagine what they would look like, gray hair, a slower step certainly. She had seen an artist's projection of John F. Kennedy at seventy years old, jowls and thinning hair, eyeglasses; he looked like his father. Probably Nikolas would be a famous writer, a spokesman for his generation—
their
generation. That was what he wanted for himself but she was not sure she wanted it for him. People would stake claims. She thought about the various claims, invitations to conferences, speaking engagements. He would be expected to have an opinion about everything under the sun, so there would be no time for repose.

Lucia watched the elderly couple stop at the concessionaire's for coffee, taking their time making a selection. She imagined the apartment they would have when Nikolas was famous, five or six rooms at least with a bedroom big enough for a desk so he could write at night. The desk would be long and deep to accommodate the manuscripts and reams of blank paper. The window would look out onto a city square, empty at night but in daytime filled with trees and flowers that would change with the seasons. They would have the apartment and a country place somewhere near a good piste for skiing in the winter—she wanted to watch the racers flying hell-bent top to bottom, success or failure measured in tenths of seconds—and for hiking the rest of the time. She wondered if Nikolas wanted children. They had not spoken of a family. There was plenty of time for that. Lucia knew that she was bourgeois to the core but she knew also that their apartment would become a salon, a gathering place for intellectuals. She looked at the blank sheet of paper before her and thought that it was much easier thinking about the future than the task at hand. She watched the elderly couple take their coffee to a table and sit, laughing about something; the woman was telling some story, her husband looking at her with an attitude of the utmost anticipation. They looked as if they had been together forever with the entire afternoon yet to come. They looked invulnerable. Lucia tasted her coffee and found it had grown cold. She drew the sheet of stationery close to her and after what seemed a long time began to write.

Lucia wrote that she was unable to help herself. She had found the man she had desired her whole life and had come to assume did not exist. She thought he was an illusion, someone who inhabited her imagination. But that was not true. He was real. Nikolas Janos was real, he was heaven-sent to her and now he was inside her and all around her and it was the same with him. Do you remember Madame Brun? One night she described to me—us, but I think you were not listening carefully—the apparatus of the communist state. She called it a tapestry of many colors. A bright red thread ran through it. The thread ran both vertically and horizontally, described circles, arcs. Madame Brun said when you lived in such a state you could not move without running into the red thread; your personal life, your professional life, your work, your recreation, all of it circumscribed by the red thread. Didn't it sound ghastly? Worse than ghastly. But if you apply that picture to a lover—unable to move without finding him and happy that he is there—then it becomes not ghastly at all but sublime. That is the way it is with us. I feel as if I have been reborn, Lucia wrote. From the very beginning in America she had felt out of her depth, homesick one moment, clinging to Alec the next. She was so very young and without experience. She was lonely. Their first years together had been a dream, their little house with its rose garden, her work at the zoo. Alec was so attentive. Mathilde arrived. But then the dream began to come apart. She saw herself imprisoned in a glass cage; things were visible but she was unable to grasp them. Had he experienced that? She was displaced, her heart out of joint. She looked forward so to her evenings at the Count and Countess d'An's and almost at once she felt her world turn. The way I felt was lawless, she wrote. I was searching for excitement of the sort I knew as a young girl, not a piste this time but a soiree in the open air. I knew they were dangerous company, rootless unsettled people, not dangerous to themselves but definitely dangerous to others because they had so little to lose. I knew the house next door was unwholesome for me and for us and yet there was nothing I could do about it. I knew you hated the evenings at the d'Ans'. You cannot deny this. This was not a world you knew about or cared for. That is why I was so surprised when you suggested we live in Europe. I don't believe Europe is your place. I saw you arrive at our house—the back light went on, and I knew you were home—and sit alone in the garden until the party ended. You and your evenings of baseball and reverie and I was unable to share either one. And that drove us apart. And one night I tripped on a loose flagstone and my life changed and I knew nothing I could do would put it right. I was overwhelmed and without resources. Perhaps that is not entirely true: I had resources but they were put to selfish purposes. I tell you that the glass of my cage suddenly shattered and shattered glass cannot be made whole. Nikolas and I seduced each other, that's the truth of it. It did not begin that way but that was how it came to be. I have no regrets of it. I went to Zurich to see if I had lost my mind or found it. You must not blame yourself.